re: writing stubs to access C (etc) libraries from Lisp. There are several lisp programs which will take your *.h files and attempt to automatically write all the stubs. This cannot be entirely automated but my limited experience with this suggests it can be quite successful. I've linked to libraries (GMP, I think) that were in some python format, years ago.
My own timings are on a different lisp, different compiler optimizations, different computer. The range of speed-ups in compiling Maxima could conceivably from 0 (i.e. not faster at all... maybe even slower...) to huge - 1000X . Based on absolutely no statistical evidence, my guess is that the vast majority of users of Sage use it as a front end to Maxima, or things which could easily be done in Maxima but might also be done in the Pythonish Sage front end language/ system itself. I further guess there is not really a competition between Sage and the commercial Ma*. Rather, competition for mind-space between (A) users who simply download Maxima from sourceforge and use it, possibly contributing to it, and (B) users who download Sage, are told how great python is, and then end up using Sage as a front-end to Maxima, but through an apparently poor pexpect interface. I think it is less likely that such B) users will understand or make use of the tools that might be available in Maxima, and much less likely that these users will contribute to the tools in Maxima, which can most easily be accomplished by writing in the Maxima language or in Common Lisp. Not Python. It would be simple for William to say, occasionally, that Maxima is written in Common Lisp and it is possible to incrementally improve the Maxima component efficiently by writing in Lisp. People do it all the time. Instead we see the occasional proposal which looks like "Let's encourage some high school student to rewrite the X facility of Maxima in Python this summer. It's bound to be much faster and better, especially since we can compile parts of it via Cython. And since Python is so easy to learn." The idea that what is difficult about (say) the symbolic definite integration program in Maxima is that it was written in Lisp rather than Python is, to me, a symptom of very shallow analysis of the situation. But we have wandered off the track of the subject line. RJF -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
